LEGENDARY
by Morbane
Summary: An idea for the role of Legendaries in the Pokémon world. It's an AU set before the era of Pokémon Trainers, focusing on Clare, who meets Raikou.
1. Morning

For Corinth, o'course, and Zali and Chenloeth. 

I don't own Pokémon, and as you will see, no one owns Raikou. 

This fic is strongly Alternate Universe. It should be Fantasy/Angst/Sci Fi… oh well. Just watch out, the timeline isn't anything you're used to, as the fic is set two hundred years before the Trainer era of the Pokémon World as I see it. 

LEGENDARY

Morning. 

Knobs of water lay on the trampoline like smooth river pebbles. The 'river' was below them, on the grass, bathing every blade in liquid. Like a real river, light danced in pinpoints across its surface. As if something had moved across it, a V-shape of grass was frosted, a white wake across the water. 

Clare went inside and made breakfast, watching the streetlight up on Valley Road from the corner of her eye. She poured Patrick's cereal and peeled the mandarin oranges. The darkness began to dry up a little, but the mist higher up didn't. The streetlight hadn't gone out yet. 

Soon, she picked up her schoolbag, heavy with unusual things, and slung it across her shoulders. Mist flamed around Mt Luminary, the hill that gave the suburb its name. The sun was white, but the footpath and the houses and the trees were shaded gray. Blue, green, and brown struggled through in patches. 

Through the village centre and across one road, and around the corner. She cruised on autopilot on the muddy border of grass edge and pavement. Here it was brown and macadamia shells were scattered across it. Morning broke the outlines of spiderwebs across the bars of the gates she passed. 

Clare looked up and saw the fabulous outline over the summit of Mt Luminary, leaning through the mist, saw the billowing, rippling mane, the pale gleaming of the pronged metal crest. The Pokémon god was dark against the mist, of no particular colour, silent, standing. 

Like an instinct, Clare ran. Up the wide path leading to a gate onto the mountain; one stride each on the long stairs; through the gate, nearly tripping as she shut it behind her. She gave up on the track after seconds and climbed vertically up Mt Luminary's side, barely dodging the wild bushes, clawing into the grass. ~Skystrike! Skystrike!~ Clare crossed a flat grass terrace that made her feel, in a peripheral sort of way, as if she was going down a slope; then up again, and up, and up. 

She stopped once, her breath causing a cloud of mist that blurred her glasses and reduced the trees above her to brown and green blobs. Her body wanted her to stop forever and then go down, but she went up again. 

~Wait!~

She went up the final slope. There were no people on the edge overlooking Mt Luminary's crater; no one anywhere on the hill that she could see. Skystrike wasn't there. 

~/~

Ten minutes later she stood at another crossing, waiting for cars that blinked myopically at her as they passed. She didn't know why she hadn't kept looking; it wasn't because of the incentive of school. In the same way that she had known the beast on the hill was the Raikou Skystrike, she knew that by the time she had reached Mt Luminary's summit, Skystrike had not been there. 

She felt nauseated; sick the way you usually feel, when your mind and body tell you different things. 

Now she was late. Not late for school, exactly - she would miss a meeting with her Drama class group, for which she had brought props and costumes. That was worse. Her Drama group would feel justified, now, in blaming anything wrong with their project on her, and the teacher would only be too glad to listen to them. 

Pray for those that (somethingly) use you and persecute you... Clare flung her black curly hair back with her black tense fingers, and set her teeth to endure. 

~/~

"Skin and hair, these are the most important things in the world." – Nadine Gordimer

Clare was reflecting on this as she walked home in the mid-afternoon. She thought it was true. But accents were important, too, and history, and a language that no one else knew. If it hadn't been her hair, and skin, and height, then it would have been the fact that a French president born in a French-governed African country had pushed the button and nearly killed Earth. It was the first thing that anyone learned in History; then you went forward to the gathering of the survivors, the creation of Pokémon, the humans' hundred-thousand year 'sleep', and the beginning of this age's civilisation. 

Or you went back and studied all that was left of Old World History, from the dinosaurs to the pressures of the 22nd Century AD, with all the gaps. 

Gaps, apparently, caused by the actions of one woman. Who had had the same nationality and appearance as Clare's ancestors. Skin and hair... 

Usually, walking to and from school, Clare didn't walk over Mt Luminary but around it. It was a small local hill, no higher than a skyscraper but quite broad, set aside as public park-land, and as she neared it this afternoon, Clare's thoughts changed. She stared at its blunt peak and visualised Skystrike standing there. It was still hard to believe that she had imagined him. 

She walked through the Mt Luminary shops and into a cybercafé. When she was eight, before the Red Pandemic, she had saved up to buy a storage account on the Web. She had liked to write stories, and had had no computer or extra stationery at home. 

It had been six years since she had accessed the particular story that now appeared on the grimy monitor. She scrolled down and read:

[Sara the Legendrider soared through the clouds on Skystrike's back, holding her Spear she carried it for show only. She did'nt need to hold onto her Raikous grey mane beccause she was so use to riding him. they were going to meeting with Zapdos, ask her help for defeat the Tyrant adn Rescue Entei and Yves from his dungions.]

The Legendrider story was the first and most powerful of all her stories: Sara, with her Legend partner, Skystrike, was the Legendriders' leader, and there were five others. All of them had their own Pokémon friends, and they all spent their time upholding justice and doing battle with evil in a mediaeval Pokémon world. Absentmindedly, Clare began to correct the grammar and spelling errors in the document.

Clare remembered making lists of names of Pokémon friends when she was in primary school, shutting out the senseless cruelty of everyone else to her. She had scribbled them down in pencil in the back of her exercise books and got in trouble.

Another bit made her almost giggle as she punctuated it. It was the "Descriptions" area:

[Sara was just below medium height and had long, straight, pale-pink hair. She was very slim with a small, thin nose, and her eyes were green. They were bright and stood out in her pale face. She had a mix of ancestors, North American, Japanese, and Australian. Her feet were petite. She was very beautiful and Shou liked her.]

~Eight year olds can be so transparent,~ thought Clare, staring down at the description of her own Legendrider character, who should have looked like a princess or a child model, and nothing at all like Clare. Clare wasn't so self-ignorant now, but she wondered if she had really changed. Eight year old Clare hadn't wanted to be black, frizzy-haired and French-African. Fourteen-year-old Clare didn't either, and still wasn't quite resigned to it. 

She'd made up all the characters, basing them on no one she knew, but to her 14 year old eyes they were obviously the friends she had wished she'd had. And Skystrike had been the most important. 

Had she made him up, or written down half-truths? 

She still thought of all Legendary Pokémon as more than rare and valuable Pokémon. She secretly subscribed to the idea that they were forces of good, keeping the balance of Nature. She loved reading encyclopaedias that said that Legendaries had never been spotted in groups, only on their own, although encyclopaedias believed, unlike Clare, that there had to be more than one Entei or Suicune or Moltres. 

Clare signed off and continued homewards. She had made up the Legendrider world as a way of escape, she knew very well. And the Raikou Skystrike was still her most powerful symbol of freedom and escape, six years on. 

~/~

Clare began to leave for school at an earlier time, and come home later. Her family didn't comment. There were only two other people in her family, her younger brother Jerome and her father. Both of them worked - Jerome, as a sort of apprentice to her father's friend, and her father, as a factory worker, on a twelve-hour day shift. It was the only job that was offered to him. He would have done well in school, but low grades were all he was given. Now that his wife was dead, he worked even harder. 

Clare felt guilty, but she was smart enough, and school was the only way for her - being female and of a certain conspicuous racial type - to help herself later on. It was painful and made her bitter but it was better than home, where the pain of Jerome and Patrick eddied in the air. She didn't burden them with her problems, and she didn't let them burden her with theirs: deal. 

Was it always like this? she wondered, and decided that the situation had changed a little, but the atmosphere had only gradually darkened. Her mother and grandmother had died early in the Red Pandemic that had existed from the time that she had been nine to the time that she had been twelve. Then she, her brother, and her father had left their ghost town and eventually ended up in Mt Luminary. 

Maybe it was true that discrimination had gotten worse since the Red Pandemic. Clare supposed that it had something to do with the bad situation, and people wishing for the fabulous medical advances, and general luxury, of the Old Earth. 

But they all had hope left. Clare hadn't even realised she had it until she had run towards the outline of Skystrike on the hill. 

And she thought over the next weeks that she had lost it again, as on her detours between home and school she found nothing on Mt Luminary's peak. 

__

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there... Psalm 139


	2. Reasoning

For Corinth, o'course, and all those who run. 

I don't own Pokémon, and as you will see, no one owns Raikou. 

This fic is strongly Alternate Universe. It should be Fantasy/Angst/Sci Fi… oh well. Just watch out, the timeline isn't anything you're used to, as the fic is set two hundred years before the Trainer era of the Pokémon World as I see it. 

LEGENDARY

Reasoning

~Hurt me, people,~ Clare thought defiantly as she was shoved into a locker. ~At least I know why.~ 

But why defy them? Why stand up to them at all? If she had a goal, a light at the end of the tunnel, something to struggle for... But she didn't. She had no hope for any difference in the rest of her life. When she left school, her appearance would deny her jobs, and even if she got jobs, she would never get promotions. Someday she would be on her knees cleaning a public toilet at one o'clock in the morning, and even the drunks would kick her. Or maybe she'd get involved... in the rougher parts of town... Pokégods, she didn't even want to think about it. 

It wasn't the latest locker-shoving that was making tears splash down Clare's face now. It was the concept, shoved up into her face like the locker door, that she had nothing better ever to look forward to. That her whole life was going to be lived in isolation from other people, because she was Clare. 

Even the teachers turned a blind eye... or worse. So would all authority... forever. 

~Skystrike, why don't you come?~ she begged silently. ~I believe in you! Why can't you come and take me away?~

And of course, he never came. 

~/~

A few days later, staring at her blotched face in a girls' bathroom mirror, Clare was filled with a volcanic rage. 

~I'm not crying any more for you,~ she told her reflection. ~Never again. Not until you cry for another reason. This is the last tear because I don't care! I don't care what my future is, I don't care who I am, I'm not crying! I'm not caring! Not about them! Not about this!~

She searched for a container in her schoolbag, and found an empty film canister. Blinking her eyes, she made one last tear roll down her face, and encapsulated it in plastic.

"That was my last tear," she said, staring down at the closed canister. Pushing away the silent cynicism that said in her mind, You are a cliché.

~/~

And yet, later, she was running from school; actually running, her arms pumping to balance the weight of her bag, loping along past the huge kauri tree growing in the yard of a group of flats; passing a group of girls who went quiet as she passed. Inside her head was a litany, rhythmic enough to be set to a tune, over and over - ~I'm not thinking, I'm not thinking, I'm not thinking... I'm not...~

Sometimes her head filled up with too many agonising thoughts until she ran to be free of them all. She wanted to flash past things, keep running until she found herself somewhere different entirely, like a different neighbourhood, or at best a different universe. The running came from a kind of despair that was more like desperation - something so intense that it drove her along until she could exorcise herself. 

Sometimes she didn't run, she paced, getting up and sitting down because she didn't know what she could do and she had nowhere to go. It was like she was clockwork, with pain as leftover energy that wouldn't let her be still. And she would look at other things, avoiding the mirror or pen and paper, shutting the pain down until she was exhausted. 

Today she was just running, for once her mind almost clear, except for the litany. She didn't even notice crossing roads, or that the slope she was climbing was getting steeper. She was almost singing the litany - it became triumphant - because for once she was managing to escape. 

And she came up the crest of Mt Luminary, and the Raikou Skystrike was there. 

Clare walked up to him and reached up towards his rippling smoky mane, and didn't even cry. As if hypnotised, she leapt catlike onto his back. And he took off into a dreamlike flight. 

~/~

First they rose. The Legendary stretched out his front paws - each leg as long as Clare' s body - and sped upwards through the will that he concentrated into them. Up, with the wind whipping his mane, creating a sea of the turbulent mane that enclosed Clare, as she knelt on his back. Purple haze clouded Clare's eyes and was blown away again. And she felt nothing but an intensity of feeling, like an emotional clenched fist - felt it fill her and tense her and shake her... a scream built up in her throat… 

And then the mood dropped, through shock and grief and depression and lethargy and nothing. They were leveling off, swimming through a cloud, pure white and damp. There was no space in Clare's mind for practical thoughts; it didn't occur to her that she shouldn't be able to breathe. She just felt the nothingness and saw the endless whiteness, and the purple mane and the huge head of the Pokémon God in front of her, steadying their flight with one forepaw forward and one back - his hind paws were spread a little. 

~/~

Nothing... enough nothing to begin to wear at Clare's mind a little, and make her feel tired and dazed. But then they rose again, vertically this time. The Raikou Legendary threw his head back and they emerged in a level between clouds. 

And now Clare could wonder a bit. She felt a little refreshed, but still unsteady. She looked with fascination at the tops of clouds below her, and the smooth gloom above her; and the way her bearer skimmed between the cloud formations, moving like a flying reindeer, and completely without friction. 

~/~ 

It took a moment for Clare to realise that the cloud above them was thinning out. It drifted past in rags of mist, turning palely blue, and finally burst away to reveal intense blue. 

Blue so blue she couldn't compare it to anything. She felt a fierce intense joy that this even existed, these clouds and this blue. Even the immense Raikou looked small compared to the vast stretch of white clouds below them, and the blue that deepened and deepened as she looked up. And she was literally nothing here, tiny on the Pokémon God's back… nothing mattered. She could let everything go. 

~/~

They flew on and on and on. 

Clare's mind was completely clear and free. She watched the clouds, and she watched Skystrike's subtle mane shimmer all around her, like a heat haze. Her back didn't ache from sitting up straight, nor did her ankles hurt from kneeling on the Lightning Legendary's back, although she wasn't used to kneeling this way. 

She could tell, somehow, when they started to return. They were traveling in the same direction all the while, but something changed about the journey. The clouds broke away and Skystrike dived… Clare closed her eyes and felt her body absorb the power of the wind that rushed past them. Then the Pokémon God landed and she found herself standing at the side of Mt Luminary's crater, exactly where she had leapt onto him after school. Her schoolbag sat where she had left it, looking as fixed in place as the monument it sat by. 

She turned around, and saw that the Legendary God had gone. Again, she was alone on the summit. And it was night-time. 

Cold and dark and windy, with streetlamps. 

Clare began to be afraid. She never went anywhere after dark. Neither did anyone of her racial type, if they valued their lives. It was a death sentence. 

She had a walk of fifteen minutes from here to home. The streets were poorly lit, and first she had to walk down Mt Luminary's side. And she couldn't stay here - it was deserted now, but no one knew who they'd encounter if they went at night to the top of the hill. 

Clare was shivering now. She began to pace up and down in the carpark by the monument. She would have to walk by the road - but that way, she was more likely to encounter people. Which would give her the greatest chance of survival - the road or the slope? And which way, after the hill?

As well as frightened, she was angry. Skystrike Lord had left her here without any form of protection. She was angry at herself, too, just for being herself. 

~And this is what it's like. All my life it'll be this way. Afraid of things that no one else needs to fear, but I do. Any white person, any Asian person, any non-French-African person would be sure to get home safely. And I can't be sure. And I can't do anything!~

Her peace of mind, that the Raikou Legendary had caused by his flight, was gone. She had been plunged back into the struggles of her own life again. What was the use of that fantasy? 

~You must use it.~ 

Clare whirled around. Skystrike stood facing her from across the hill's crater. At a distance, he was no less awesome. His face was unreadable; his mask glowed faintly - although that could have been light reflected from the summit's streetlamps. 

~I have cleared your mind, and you have clouded it again. Now clear it yourself, and grant yourself your own protection.~

For a moment, deity and teenager locked eyes. Raikou's eyes were deep... she nearly fell into them. But then they became blurry and she couldn't make them out. She needed glasses. As if she'd ever be able to afford them. 

Right. Start. 

First there had been a huge build-up of emotion, so Clare dredged up all her resentments and pains and held them close to her. Anger and fear and despair merged and possessed her until she wanted to scream... She realised she was holding her breath. She let it out. And with the breath, let the bottom drop away from all those terrible feelings so that she was plunging... down... horror, shock, grief, misery, depression, lethargy... nothing.

Nothing.

Clare sank to her knees. Her eyes were unfocussed. Her hands fell to the grass and she looked at it very closely, seeing first the details of one blade, then the entire blade, then all the blades of grass around it. Clover, too, and a pebble. As the picture grew, she build the world up around herself, and then became aware of her own existence... rebuilt herself.

Finally she got to her feet again, staring at the world she found herself in.

The Legendary was gone, but he had left a message in the air. 

~Correct. It is the first step to your power.~

"_Oh, reason not the need!"_ -King Lear, Shakespeare

"Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait point." - Pascal

~/~

A/N: Thanks, by the way, to Barbara LeMaster who pointed out a typo and led me to proof-read a bit. Thus, the updated chapters. 


End file.
